Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday April 07, 2004 @10:09AM
from the this-will-get-sticky dept.

Several folks submitted the press release announcing the formation of the X.Org Foundation and the release of X11R6.7 of the X Window System. The XOrg Foundation is the successor to the X Consortium, formed by many of the most notworthy participants in the XFree86 Project. This code release is a tree forked from the last XFree86 release not troubled by that pesky license change. Since Mandrake, Gentoo, OpenBSD, and Debian have already rejected the new XFree86 license, this new code tree will likely become the default X11 for most Linux users. I've attached the press release that explains more details about the code release, as well as the X.Org foundation itself.

The new X.Org Foundation will help drive the X Window System to supportstate-of-the-art desktop technologies

San Francisco, CA., April 6, 2004 - X.Org Foundation today announces their first release of the X Window System since the formation of the Foundation in January of this year. The new X.Org release, called X Window System Version 11 Release 6.7 (X11R6.7), builds on the work of the X.Org X11R6.6 and XFree86TM Project Inc. V4.4RC2 releases to combine many of the latest developments from a large number of the participants and companies working with the X Window community. The X Window System X11R6.7 release can be found at http://www.x.org/.

We have made great progress in creating a framework upon which further development of the X Window System can be based, agreed the Interim Board of the Foundation. We expect to provide the desktop community with at least two more releases of the X Window System before the end of this year to encompass all of the new technologies and ideas that we are developing.

This release marks the return to community development of the X Window System under governance open to all contributors for the first time since the founding of the X Consortium in 1988, said Jim Gettys, co-founder of the X Window System, Interim X.Org Foundation board member and member of the research staff of HP Labs.

We welcome the formation of the X.Org Foundation and are looking forward to support this group to bring the work on the X Window System to a new technological level, said Egbert Eich, X Window System developer at Novell's SUSE LINUX business unit.

Matthias Ettrich, Director of Software Development at Trolltech, said As a multi-platform GUI toolkit vendor, we appreciate the value of a powerful underlying windowing system, and as such, we are excited about the direction X.Org is heading. We are very much looking forward to supporting new technologies around X, and we will do our share to make the advances of the platform accessible to software developers.

Being an underlying technology to the most popular desktops on all GNU Systems, in particular GNOME and KDE, the X Window System is indeed an essential part of most Free Software operating systems, said Georg C.F. Greve, president of the FSF Europe. It helps many users to access and enjoy the freedom of Free Software. We are glad that X.Org will from now on watch over this enabling technology.

Red Hat is pleased to be working with the new X.Org Foundation to build a vibrant open source community around X Window System innovation. Look for X11R6.7 in the upcoming Fedora Core 2 and future Red Hat Enterprise Linux products, said Havoc Pennington, desktop development manager at Red Hat.

As one of the largest GNU/Linux distribution projects in the world, the Debian Project is delighted to see that freedom and diversity are alive and well in the X technology sector. We're also delighted that the X.Org Foundation is dedicated to retaining the licensing model that has made the X Window System an enduring success, said Branden Robinson of the Debian GNU/Linux Project. Like us, the X.Org Foundation is a member-driven organization devoted to Free Software. We cannot help but be enthusiastic about them and the work they're doing for the X Window System and Free Software communities alike.

An open source project works best with a large community of active contributors. OSI welcomes the return of X to open source development by the entire community. I'm looking forward to contributing myself, said Russell Nelson, Vice-President of the Open Source Initiative.

Cygwin/X is benefiting heavily from the community-building spirit of the X.Org Foundation and their open development environment. We are pleased to be basing our releases on the good work of the X.Org Foundation, said Harold L Hunt II of the Cygwin/X project.

The XonX Project is very pleased that the X.Org Foundation has been eager to support Darwin and Mac OS X. X11R6.7 adds new features that will be appreciated by many Mac OS X users, said Torrey Lyons, XonX Project Founder.

Membership of the X.Org Foundation is free to all participants. Applications for membership are now being accepted, and active participants in the further development of the X Window System are invited to visit: http://www.x.org/XOrg_Foundation_Membership.html to complete a membership application. Participation in the Foundations Sponsor Group is also available to those who wish to financially support the activities The X.Org Foundation. Current Sponsors include Hewlett Packard, IBM, and SUN Microsystems.

About The Foundation ReleaseX11R6.7 is the first official X.Org Foundation release. It is the successor release to X11R6.6 from X.Org. To assure consistency with industry and community requirements and practices, it was developed from the X.Org X11R6.6 code base and the XFree86 V4.4RC2 code base, with the addition of bug fixes and enhancements. These enhancements include: new IPv6 functionality, Freetype V2.1.7, fontconfig V2.2.2, Xft V2.1.6, Xcursor V1.1.2, and Xrender V0.8.4, with corresponding changes in documentation and notices. Additional source and binary releases are anticipated during 2004.

About The X Window SystemThe X Window System provides the only common networked windowing environment bridging the heterogeneous platforms in today's computing. The X Window System is one of the most successful open-source, collaborative technologies developed to date and is the standard graphical window system for the Linux and UNIX operating systems. The inherent independence of the X Window System from the operating system, the network and the hardware, as well as its successful interoperability, have made it widely available and deployed with more than 30 million users worldwide. All major hardware vendors support the X Window System and many third parties provide technologies for integrating X Window System applications into the networked computer or personal computer environments including Microsoft Windows, UNIX, Linux and Mac OS X. Further, thousands of software developers provide X Window System applications, and with the continued growth of Linux and the emergence of Mac OS X, the number of users is growing rapidly.

About X.Org FoundationX.Org Foundation L.L.C. is a recently formed Delaware company organized to operate as a scientific charity under IRS code 501(c)(3), chartered to develop and execute effective strategies that provide worldwide stewardship of the X Window System technology and standards. The group is currently managed by an Interim Board of Directors that includes: Stuart Anderson (Free Standards Group), Egbert Eich (SUSE), Jim Gettys (HP), Georg Greve (Free Software Foundation Europe), Stuart Kreitman (SUN Microsystems), Kevin Martin (Red Hat), Jim McQuillan (Linux Terminal Server Project), Leon Shiman (Shiman Associates) and Jeremy White (Code Weavers). The website for the X.Org Foundation can be found at http://www.x.org/.

Note to editors: UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the US and other countries. LINUX is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. XFree86 is a trademark of The XFree86 Project, Inc. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac OS is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. All other company names are trademarks of the registered owners.$"

when i read about X11 and their licensing issues i was scared: i had noticed that redhat dropped several (for me important) packages due to the fact that they are not GPL (such as pine... no flames, please, i like it more than any other mail client cause all you need is an xterm). i was wondering what would happen with x11. now i know. and (i think) i am releived...

It's not that pine is not GPL, it's that pine is altogether Not Free Software [asty.org]. Specifically, the University of Washington will not allow anyone to distribute modified versions, they've even threatened to sue people who do this with older versions of Pine. This makes it hard to work the software into a distribution like Red Hat, and even harder to want to.

Personally, I use Mutt [mutt.org], and I love it. Other people seem equally pleased with elm [instinct.org]. With both of these clients, "all you need is an xterm".

If you really prefer Pine, there are two projects to create an Free replacement for it: Hydrant [gnu.org] and OSERP [berlios.de]. I don't know how far along and usable either project is. If you just miss Pico, there's an excellent Free clone called Nano [gnu.org], which is very usable and included in most Linux distros already.

Pine has a superior IMAP implementation than any of these alternatives. The source is available for free. You can release patches to Pine. It is also easy to write scripts for it. Red Hat had done this at one time.

What modifications are needed to it in the first place? The stock-binary is well-maintained. And it is easy enough to apply a patch to the source code & recompile.

OSERP is under active development, but is still very alpha. I thought Hydrant had died, but some of the CVS files have been updated within the past year.

Why take RMS's opinion on free/nonfree as scripture? It is funny to see gratis software that ships with source being bashed for not being libre more than progams which don't ship with source.

I don't have a problem with Debian's commitment to libre software & their choice not to ship pine. But other distros don't seem to have a consistent stance on how free apps have to be before they're included.

That's the argument I hear from DJB fans, too. The modifications can be as simple as telling it to look for config files in the place that a particular OS keeps them, rather than where the application thinks they should go. Now, IANAPineExpert, but imagine that it wants link against something in/usr/lib, but on a particular OS, that library is in/usr/local/lib. Patching the system to look in the latter directory may be enough to violate the terms

The Fedora Core development stream is already switched over to the x.org release. The test2 release of Fedora Core 2 uses it. So Fedora Core two will have kernel 2.6, X.org, Gnome 2.6, KDE 3.2.1, and SELinux (which totally sucks ass integration wise right now, and will hopefully be disabled by default when Fedora Core 2 is actually release, or I'll probably switch to Debian until SELinux actually works as shipped).

I just installed the e-build that's already in the tree. And told etc-update to automatically update all 200+ config files. >:) (crazy I know, but it works) make sure you read the info on the release notes page, and see what portage tells you at the end of the emerge. There is some useful info there.

The only thing I've seen so far, that I don't like, is a little bit of degradation of quality in the AA of fonts. I'm sure this is just a configuration issue, that I haven't found the answer to yet. But it's definitely usable right now. You will have to unmerge xfree and xft, as they are blocked by "xorg-x11" which is the name of the new e-build.

Why so many people think that GPL incompatible == not free? How is current XFree86 license non-free? Yeah, I know it's not about free-as-in-beer, but how isn't XFree free-as-in-speech?

This was discussed ad nauseum in the previous Slashdot articles about this, such as the one linked to in the story, above.

But to spoonfeed you the gist of it, since you're not going to get off your duff and read the previous discussion: it's not that it's not a free license. It's the practical ramifications of being incompatible with the GPL that are the issue. It's the opinion of some lawyers and legal-types that the GPL incompatibility means trouble for software that's built upon the XF86 framework and therefore must be consistent with the terms of the XF86 license. To build GNOME, KDE, etc. against XF86, and then release them under the GPL, would violate the terms of the XF86 license, since the GPL permits things that the XF86 license does not.

That's true but you're hiding the reason. The crux of the matter is the new XF86 license imposes a new advertising clause that *imposes restrictions beyond* the scope of the GPL. The GPL forbids additional restrictions (sec 6) and, in 50 words or less, that's why the licenses are considered incompatible.

The problem isn't that the license isn't free enough. The problem is only that it isn't compatible with GPL. This is bad because GPL apps can't link with it (Yes I'm aware that xlibs still is old license, but who knows in the future). The GPL is as much to blame as this new license. The easy part about the GPL is that it is one license (You cannot add or remove from it and call it GPL), it also makes it impossible to add advertising clauses.

Second, you are right that XFree86 is on the outs with Debian. At least, that's my understanding. Putting it in nonfree is something I never thought about, and I suppose it's possible (maybe if there's a DD here, he/she can say whether it is or isn't). But I'm not sure what the point would be; if all the GUI apps in main are built using the libraries from an X.Org release, what would you use an XFree86 in nonfree for?

Hopefully, a DD will step in and comment if I've missed something here.

Putting XFree86 in non free would mean that all software which depends on X would have to move to contrib. That is unacceptable.
But The main issue isn't about freeness, but about that it is not legal to link something like VNC which is GPL with the new license.

Yeah, but Debian is no longer supporting nonfree software with their next (sarge) release. Doesn't that put XFree86 back on the Outs with Debian?

Sorry, but your first sentence is completely wrong. The amendment to remove support for non-free in Debian didn't even get a majority, let alone the 3:1 majority it would have required to win. See these links: Debian Planet [debianplanet.org], official Debian vote results [debian.org].

It is true that no one on Debian's X Strike Force has intentions to package any of the XFree86 releases that the new license is applied to. But since Debian is an entirely volunteer project, conceivably a developer who really wanted to embark on this thankless task could do so, although the packages would probably have
to go into non-free [debian.org].

I had been happily downloading my cygwin updates when this news came out on/. I looked at where the installer was: xorg-x11-6.7.0.0-1.tar.bz2 !!! It's announced today and it's already up for download in the distros ! Maybe that's why this 16Mb download is taking forever...

After tremendous testing and community feedback, the 4.4.0 Release is now available for twenty (yep that's the number 20!) popular platforms. Distros that are carrying it in with the license change integrated into their distribution are: NetBSD, Slackware Linux, Conectiva, and others. See our distro support page for the full breakout.

Will those distros continue to go with XFree86 now that the X.Org Foundation is not just talking about it but is also actually delivering a forward moving, credible alternative?

And what is this alternative? A rebranded XFree86 4.3.0.1 with the various updates that could be easily found online?

Nope. The alternative is a cleaned-up fork of XFree86 4.4RC2, binary-compatible with XFree86 4.4.0.

X.org, on the other hand, has only so far made some noise about not wanting to be forced to give XFree86 some well-deserved credit

It's not the giving of credit that's the issue; it's the matter of GPL compatibility. Cute strawman.

applied some debatable updates to the code (using an unstable freetype2 is probably not wise)

Freetype 2.1.7 is the latest stable release of Freetype2. Not everyone uses the Linux version number scheme where an odd-numbered minor version number indicates a development version rather than a stable version.

"The XFree86 client libs are not affected by the license change, so if there's a GPL compatibility problem with XFree86 right now, what is it? Let's have it."

If you don't care about upgrade paths, I suppose there is no problem, since the problem with using XFree86 4.4.0 right now is that the upgrade path is legally uncertain. David Dawes has been non-committal about whether the XFree client libs will be under the new GPL-incompatible license in the future. Given that the XFree client libs are under the old

That's in the works in the freedesktop.org X server, which is currently in development (but features like alpha-blending and shadows already work if you're interested in checking the source out of CVS). The X.org server is the 'stable' continuation of the XFree86 codebase.

I take that to mean that 'right now...kdrive itself is not intended to be a replacement for XFree86.' That would certainly be a true statement. However, I think the overall goal is that the advancements in the fd.o X server will be mainlined when they are done. Whether that is accomplished by making kdrive a stable replacement for xfree86/x.org or whether the advancements in kdrive will be ported to xfree86/x.org remains to be seen. Remember that all the X server codebases that we're talking about are relat

The Nvidia driver is *not * open-source, although the company has allowed an open-source driver to be developed. AFAIK The open-source driver (NV) was created by Mark Vojkovich and he maintains it himself. *This page is not for that driver. * The new proprietary driver from Nvidia is easier to install than prior versions as Nvidia has shifted to a single file for installation. They have attempted to make the setup as simple as possible with the installation

I wish they [X.org] would join wih the freedesktop.org X-server folks and bring true alpha to the desktop...

They already have, and they are. One of the big accomplishments of X.org so far is to split the system into multiple isolated modules: you can now easily package, compile, and run the Kdrive server as an alternative to the X.org server on platforms supported by Kdrive, without affecting the rest of the X tree. Work is underway on several freedesktop.org/X.org projects to bring the Kdrive alpha compositing into the X.org server infrastructure.

Yep, I can confirm that 1.0-5336 works just fine on FC2 test2. It may be necessary to build a custom kernel, though. A couple of new 2.6.4 (I think.4) parameters cause a lockup with these drivers; you need to ensure that CONFIG_4KSTACKS and CONFIG_REGPARM are not set. This bit me with the 2.6.4-1.300 kernel.

Now waiting for the trolls to come boiling out of their caves, holding this up as a shining example of why Linux will never make it on the desktop. To forestall them: 1) this is a test release, and 2) this is the risk you take with binary drivers. I expect FC2 final will have worked around the problem (and hopefully a newer release from Nvidia will fix it).

If XFree86 had been doing an exemplary job everyone would be using 4.4 with the new license and still be talking to XFree86 about it, trying to come up with a solution. Instead XFree86 had annoyed lots of developers who were working on XFree86 but outside the organisation, for example cygwin who could not get XFree86 to incorporate cygwin specific patches in any sort of reasonable manner as they would generally sit around for months before anything happened if anything did. The XFree86 development structure just doesn't seem right anymore, hence when they tried to ram a change down everyones throats without any meaningful discussion people quickly lost interest in them started building a new development model. I think it was more the prinicple of telling XFree86 finally that they can't just do whatever the hell they like and expect everyone to put up with it, that's a fact of FOSS code, your only a good fork away from death so you don't f about and encourage people to try and take your users.

So the entire argument is about being forced to give credit where credit is due?

Only if you oversimplify. Here's an executive summary that I hope isn't oversimplified:

XFree86 new license requires that people who redistribute modified versions of XFree86 include specified people in the credits of their programs or documentation.

GPL does not require that.

GPL specifically says that it is NOT COMPATIBLE with licenses that put restrictions on the user that the GPL does not.

GPL applies to an entire work, e.g. a GNOME or KDE program plus all the libraries it's linked against.

Therefore, distributions have NO LEGAL RIGHT to distribute GPL-licensed programs linked against X libraries when the libraries are licensed under the new XFree86 license.

There is nothing morally wrong with the new XFree86 license, and it is probably even "free software" or "open source" by most definitions. The problem is that it is NOT COMPATIBLE with the majority of existing free software. If the situation were reversed, most free software were licensed under what we call the new XFree86 license, and suddenly XFree86 wanted to relicense all of its code under a radical new license they called the GPL, the complaints would be exactly the same: the new license would be incompatible with the vast majority of existing open source code.

Or, better yet, have it *see* what kind of mouse you have and whether it has a wheel or not and get rid of the silly section altogether.

It's one of those stupid things that's a pain in the ass for newbies who wonder why they can't scroll mozilla. And a non-functioning wheel out of the box leaves a *really* negative impression on people I've helped switch to Linux. I even had to manually do that on my Mandrake 9.2 box sitting behind me now.

I shit you not, when I've told people I think Linux is better, one of my friends in particular always chimes in, "Hey - at least I didn't have to fuck with a config file to get my wheel working in Windows"...

Would someone in the know please, for the benefit of the crowd, enlighten us as to whether this entire exercise was, as much as anything else, to rid the mainstream "free software X" development of David Dawes?

From reading the coverage on slashdot so far and following the source material (including specific comments by major players that name his name), that's kind of the sense I get.

Of course, the process created more openness - you can say the openness is the primary reason, but again, from following the list archives, I got the sense he was a big part of why it wasn't so open in the first place...

I have also read extensively about this problem for quite a while (the problems with XFree86 have been around quite a while, look back at Cygwin's problems and the similar problems that afflicted ati, basically patches were rotting). Whether or not David Dawes was a part of why it wasn't so open is hard to say, you have to remember he is the voice of the XFree86 board, and as such he speaks for them, not himself. XFree86 was the de facto default and remained in that position for a long time even while it was clear that it's development model no longer fitted in with everything else. The fact that they weren't dropped until they then decided to change some licenses to give themselves more credit is a sign of the reluctance to fork, but I presonally believe (and said from the outset) a fork was the right thing here unless XFree86 backed down, the key is just making sure you have enough bodies along with you (I'd have liked to see Branden from Debian on the interim board, this is a time when licenses are important and there's a man who knows them and X very well, I'd have liked to see more non-commercial people full stop actually). The question now is when and if the two trees will be incompatible vis-a-vis binary drivers, and then which versions Nvidia and Ati will support?

I'm not saying *I* feel this way, but I was wondering what people think about David Dawes' statement to the effect that the big Linux Vendors were already planning to jump to X.org, because the collection of vendors can push it in directions that make the companies happier. He hints that they used the license issue as an excuse to wag the dog, and we users have been duped.

"But David Dawes seems a little suspicious: "I have heard privately that some vendors were planning to move to an X.Org release even before this licence issue came up. That probably makes business sense for the vendors given that X.Org is a vendor-oriented organization sponsored by hardware and software companies, while XFree86 is an independent group of volunteer developers. I suspect that the licence issue may have affected the timing, but not the end result", he concluded. "

I don't think anyone has been duped at all. I do think that people have been considering for quite a while how to escape XFree86. It's development structure had become a farce, cygwin had stopped submitting patches because it was too much work trying to figure out when and if they were ever applied, ati it seems were annoyed that their patches spent months sitting in XFree86 with no reply, and then out came a new major update with no sign of them! Because even XFree86 could see this coming, they made a few changes but they didn't address the issues. Finally they decided they wanted more credit and everyone shouted back that this was too much, they continued and now there's a fork.

Having said all that, I will be very interested to see what complaints will arrise about X.org over the next few months, if they really are a commercial orientated body making decisions for the companies then perhaps another fork won't be too far away! Having a FSF member of the interim board suggests though that the people coming in here have learnt from mistakes of the past and simply want to provide some financial backing to make sure this new co-operative gets of and running smoothly.

I think it was a masterful bit of spin on David Dawes's part. I don't think it succeeds, but it's impressive anyway.

I think the big Linux vendors were already planning to jump to X.org, and the license change was just the steel girder that broke the camel's back. XFree86, as an organization, has had increasing bad publicity: patches languishing, weird political in-fighting, organizational chaos. The license change got a whole bunch of people, all at once, to stop muttering in annoyance and actually fork

I'm very glad that the major distributions took charge and dropped XFree86. While it might not have been *completely* necessary, it sent quite a message. XFree86 is about to die. Don't mess with the GPL or you're gone next.

This just gave the GPL a lot more strength, and all non-conforming licenses a lot less. You can bet that nobody else is going to test Redhat/Debian/Mandrake/etc, or else your project is done for.

... that we again had a "vibrant open source community around X Window System innovation".

We've had some innovation, but it was definitely slowing down. But vibrant community? More of a dysfunctional family. (Not that everyone was dysfunctional, by a long shot, but the leadership mix clearly wasn't working.) Having the sole focus be the PC community always worried me, too. (Yeah, I know it's the largets by orders of magnitude, but the cross-platform expertise and disciplines have a lot to offer.)

In the early days, anyone who wanted to contribute did, and it all worked rather well. X was one of the first *major* open source projects to really take off. I, for one, am glad to see it back in a form that has a chance to really start kicking some proprietary booty again.

Up until version 4.0, the XFree86 guys were getting multi-platform development for free: Debian took care of it. Debian cares a great deal about supporting multiple platforms, and Debian builds everything on a bunch of platforms and contributes back bug fixes. They were doing that for XFree86.

Now Debian is simply going to walk away from XFree86. The XFree86 project will either have to suddenly do a whole bunch of work to keep the multi-platform nature of XFree86, or else the "86" part is going to mean something again.

I find it amazing that the XFree86 guys ever thought that this license change was a good idea, and that they aren't falling all over themselves to reverse it now that the consequences are becoming clear.

Not that easy. A is already taken by a popular TV series. [ateamshrine.co.uk]. The same series actually consumed the letter T [buyersmls.com]. B is unusable, as it used to be associated with a failed operating system [beincorporated.com]. C is, obviously, a popular programming language [gnu.org]. Now, we could settle for D, but I think it could be confusing for chemists, who use it to describe chiral isomers [toxlab.co.uk]. E would be a bad idea, as e- is one of the most hated prefixes [ebusinessforum.com] of the present day. F obviously if out of question, as it stands for a chemical element [fluor.com], and G would c

The PDF there describes all the reasons they're replacing X, and they make sense. They're planning to get a 1.0 release out the door within a year. It's going to be vector-based, hardware-accelerated and so on.

I think it will eventually be the superior technology to X, which is so riddle with extensions that they're conflicting each other now.

Flamebait? He speaks the truth. X development is COMPLETELY FUCKING STAGNANT and it's all because of the petty squablling over bullshit issues. "Brad said I wasn't a good hacker, I'm gonna fork." "I don't like BSD style licenses, I'm gonna fork." "I don't like the main developers, I'm gonna fork."

And there's nobody there so say "Fuck it, someone has to get this shit moving along. Fuck the forks, let's just work on this thing."

I've got no clue what the new Xfree license entails...And it really shows in your post!

But nonetheless, I think the community is overreacting.Right. Because RedHat and Debian are *such* reactionary GPL-fundamentalists organization.

(yeah, there are forks, but they haven't been around long enough to prove their stability or their worth).You do realize that X.org is the maintainer of the reference X11R6.x codebase, and that X11R6.7 is a continuation of XFree86 4.4-RC2, which is a derivative of that reference codebase?

If we can create a modern standardized windowing protocol (which is what X11 essentially is, only broken and outdated),What is broken and outdated about the X11 protocol? Taking into account widely-supported extensions like RENDER, the X11 protocol is surprisingly Good. There are warts, to be sure (the color model, for example), but every long-lived system has those.

we can maxamize portability between platformsEh? X11 is the most portable windowing system in existance!

and radically simplify software development.So X12 will be written in Lisp:) I'd go jump on that bandwagon!

Even Microsoft would jump on the bandwagon.Have you lost *complete* touch with reality???

and seek to accomplish far too much and form their own proprietary standards.What proprietory standards???? Do you have the slightest idea what you're talking about?

We need a completely new protocol so that everyone can work together and maintain compatibility.We need to ditch a widely-supported, well-tested, mature, easily-extensible, and highly compatible protocol, and create a new, untested, immature, and unsupported one, in order to maintain compatibility?

Regarding KDE, we actually do interact directly with X11 as well as with X directly in a number of places. These include the window manager, startup notification, the system tray, window reparenting for Java support, the list goes on. Basically Qt provides support for things that can be done in a platform indepedent way, and we provide the rest in kdelibs.

Like some smoke-filled-room committee of vendors' "experts" is going to do things better than an organization that's open and responsive to both vendors and users... right.

I find it interesting that you insist (in boldface) that Apple be such an important player in that kind of process. Apple would have shipped OS X earlier if it had tempered the advice of all the experts they'd brought in with some common sense. (The obvious example is Tevanian's insistence on using Mach, which required a good part of a whole team of kernel engineers over 4 years to fix up, because it was his pet research project at CMU.)

You say the forks haven't been around long enough to prove their stability? How about Debian's for of XFree86? They port it to many architectures and then maintain a stable release for a few years while working on its replacement. I think they are proven.

This fork (X.org) is simply XFree86 4.4RC2 (before the liscense change) and I would suspect they are monitoring XFree86 for updates which aren't tainted by the new license, and they are working on it themselves. It's not a worrying fork at this stage, it's just what would have happened if XFree86 (or another FOSS project) and all it's internal developers were blown up yesterday. These people have all been working with XFree86 from the outside for quite a while and it includes Cygwin's Mr Hunt who had withdrawn cygwin from XFree86 (well stopped sending patches) because it was more work to liase with XFree86 than not to! I see good things ahead (but first we have a nice stable XFree86 4.4 replacement so there are no hiccups).

I've got no clue what the new Xfree license entails... But nonetheless, I think the community is overreacting. By dropping Xfree, we no longer have any long-term alternatives (yeah, there are forks, but they haven't been around long enough to prove their stability or their worth).

a) this IS a forkb) being as it is a fork, it is XFree, the latest version before the license change, just being improved and such.c) you might have read the press release about who is supporting it - a whole lot of people. They are now no longer behind XFree.d) XFree was a fork of the reference implementation of X, the latter being made by the X.org people to begin with.

The only question is; how many XFree86 developers will jump ship to X.org? My guess is, most of them. By changing the license, the XFree86 project has made itself irrelevant, and who want to work on an irrelevant open source project? Yes, if people continue using XFree86, you'd get credited on manuals etc., but already RedHat, SuSE and debian are moving to X.org; so you'd be credited in places no one gets to see anyway, and your patches are of no use to anyone.

If you submit GPL'ed code to a GPL'ed project, and they accepted your code, and they want to change the project's license, then they have 2 choices:1. Ask every contributor whether he agrees on the license change. Only if everybody agrees, the license can be changed.2. If not everybody agrees, then they can remove your code and write their own, and change license anyway.

So no - once your code has been GPL'ed, it cannot be relicensed, unless you agree.